and the women, the mothers of the defeated warriors
whose eyes were puffed and whose noses trickled crimson, denounced him
in virulent language over their washtubs and the back fences of Big
Cloud. You see, they didn't understand him, so they called him a "bad
one," and, being from the East and not one of themselves, "a New York
gutter snipe."

But, for all that, the name stuck. Up and down through the Rockies it
was--Toddles. Toddles, with the idea of getting a lay-over on a siding,
even went to the extent of signing himself in full--Christopher Hyslop
Hoogan--every time his signature was in order; but the official
documents in which he was concerned, being of a private nature between
himself and the News Company, did not, in the very nature of things,
have much effect on the Hill Division. Certainly the big fellows never
knew he had any name but Toddles--and cared less. But they knew him as
Toddles, all right! All of them did, every last one of them! Toddles was
everlastingly and eternally bothering them for a job. Any kind of a job,
no matter what, just so it was real railroading, and so a fellow could
line up with everybody else when the pay car came along, and look
forward to being something some day.

Toddles, with time, of course, grew older, up to about seventeen or so,
but he didn't grow any bigger--not enough to make it noticeable! Even
Toddles' voice wouldn't break--it was his young heart that did all the
breaking there was done. Not that he ever showed it. No one ever saw a
tear in the boy's eyes. It was clenched fists for Toddles, clenched
fists and passionate attack. And therein, while Toddles had grasped the
basic truth that his nickname militated against his ambitions, he erred
in another direction that was equally fundamental, if not more so.

And here, it was Bob Donkin, the night dispatcher, as white a man as his
record after years of train-handling was white, a railroad man from the
ground up if there ever was one, and one of the best, who set
Toddles--but we'll come to that presently. We've got our "clearance"
now, and we're off with "rights" through.

No. 83, Hawkeye's train--and Toddles'--scheduled Big Cloud on the
eastbound run at 9.05; and, on the night the story opens, they were
about an hour away from the little mountain town that was the divisional
point, as Toddles, his basket of edibles in the crook of his arm, halted
in the forward end of the second-class smoker to examine again the
f